2026 Guest Authors
(scroll to read bios below)

 Shashi Bhat   ...   Michael Christie   ...   Celia Haig-Brown   ...   Anne   ...  
Jess Housty   ...   Scott Alexander Howard   ...   Susan Musgrave   ...   Adam Shoalts

---

Shashi Bhat

Photo: Submitted by Author

... is the author of the story collection Death by a Thousand Cuts, and the novels The Most Precious Substance on Earth, and The Family Took Shape. 

Her fiction has received the Writers’ Trust/McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize and was a finalist for the Governor General's Award for fiction, the Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award, the National Magazine Award for fiction, and the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award, and was longlisted for the Giller Prize.

Shashi’s work has appeared in such publications as Hazlitt, The Fiddlehead, The Malahat Review, Best Canadian Stories, and The Journey Prize Stories. She is the editor of EVENT magazine and teaches creative writing at Douglas College.

---

Michael Christie

Photo: Submitted by Author

... is the author of the novel If I Fall, If I Die, which was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Kirkus Prize, was selected as a New York Times Editors' Choice Pick, and was on numerous best-of 2015 lists. His linked collection of stories, The Beggar's Garden, was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, shortlisted for the Writers' Trust Prize for Fiction, and won the Vancouver Book Award. His essays and book reviews have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Globe & Mail.

Greenwood, his most recent novel, was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. Rights have been sold in seven countries.

A former carpenter and homeless shelter worker, he lives with his two children in Victoria, British Columbia, the unceded territory of the Lkwungen speaking people, and the Songhees, Esquimalt, and WSÁNEC First Nations.

---

Celia Haig-Brown

Photo: Submitted by Author

... is the author of one of the first books on Indian Residential school written. Resistance and Renewal: Surviving the Indian Residential School won the 1988 Regional BC Book Prize. In 2022, following the recovery of the 215+ and with input from the original people involved, she published Tsqelmucwílc: KIRS, Resistance, and a Reckoning.
 
A person of white, euro-ancestry, she credits Indigenous people across the continent for continuing the education her Campbell River family started. Author and editor of three other books, she is a member of the Royal Society of Canada, a former teacher and Professor Emerita/Senior Scholar at York University.
 
Also involved in filmmaking, she is currently in post-production for her fifth, a feature length documentary based in the lives of women involved in rodeo production. Celia spent 12 years in the rodeo business with her late ex-husband. Her next book is to be auto-ethnographic fiction based in the film interviews and her own experiences.

---

Ian Ferguson

Photo: David Bruce Photography

... won the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour for Village of the Small Houses and is the co-author, with his brother, Will, of How to Be a Canadian, which was shortlisted for the Leacock Medal and won the CBA Libris Award for non-fiction.

He is the co-author, with Will Ferguson, of the bestselling Miranda Abbott Mysteries, I Only Read Murder, Mystery in the Title, and the upcoming Killer on the First Page, and has written several humour books, most notably The Survival Guide to British Columbia. He has also written & directed for the theatre, radio, and film & television.

---

Jess Housty

... (‘Cúagilákv) is a parent, writer and grassroots activist with Heiltsuk and mixed settler ancestry. They serve their community as an herbalist and land-based educator alongside broader work in the non-profit and philanthropic sectors. They are inspired and guided by relationships with their homelands, their extended family and their non-human kin, and they are committed to raising their children in a similar framework of kinship and land love.

They reside and thrive in their unceded ancestral territory in the community of Bella Bella, BC.

---

Scott Alexander Howard

Photo: Submitted by Author

... lives in Vancouver, British Columbia. He has a PhD in philosophy from the University of Toronto and was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard, where his work focused on the relationship between memory, emotion, and literature.

The Other Valley is his first novel. Connect with him at ScottAlexanderHoward.com.

---

Susan Musgrave

Photo: Submitted by Author

.. has published more than 30 books and received awards in six categories — poetry, novels, non-fiction, food writing, editing and books for children. She lives on Haida Gwaii where she owns and manages Copper Beech House. Her most recent book is Exculpatory Lilies, which was a finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Governor General’s Award for Poetry, 2023. Hunger: the Poetry of Susan Musgrave, edited by Micheline Maylor, will be published in 2025 by Wilfred Laurier University Press.

Her two biggest claims to fame are 1) the tyee salmon caught by her great-grandfather’s brother at Campbell River in the late 1800s. It is on display at the Campbell River Museum and finding her name in the index of Montreal’s Irish Mafia, by D’Arcy O’Connor.

---

Adam Shoalts

Photo: Submitted by Author

... is a professional adventurer and Westaway Explorer-in-Residence at the Royal Canadian Geographical Society. His expeditions range from mapping rivers to archaeological projects, but Shoalts is best known for his long solo journeys, including crossing alone nearly 4,000 km of Canada’s Arctic.

Named one of the “greatest living explorers” by CBC and even declared “Canada’s Indiana Jones” by the Toronto Star, Shoalts’s latest adventure was a 3,400 km solo journey from Lake Erie to the Arctic, the subject of his new national bestselling book Where the Falcon Flies.

His other books include Alone Against the North, A History of Canada in 10 Maps, Beyond the Trees: A Journey Alone Across Canada's Arctic, and The Whisper on the Night Wind, all of them national bestsellers. He has a PhD from McMaster University in history, and in his free time, enjoys long walks in the woods.

---